The Sales Brochure for Westinghouse. Scientific Belief as a Compulsory Religion

The following is a submission to you, the State Opposition and the SA Liberal Party. The submission consists of my request for more open government, a very inexpensive process by which South Australians may access information, and for a reconsideration of the treatment of aspects of information which is at present commercial in confidence. Where public interest is thwarted by corporate and government privacy, confidentiality and secrecy provisions, history shows that the people of South Australia have been placed in ignorance and therefore at consequent risk.

Thank you for your consideration

Yours Faithfully,

Paul Langley

SUBMISSION TO MR. STEVEN MARSHALL, LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION,
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Section 1 Criminal Precedent

Context: The South Australian government has asked the population to consider the nuclear future of this state of Australia. The government and the people may consult who ever they like in the course of this debate. I certainly have and will continue to do so.

Australia’s history shows cause to remain vigilant against the restriction of information from the public gaze:

“A top secret report on the operation was prepared, submitted to the Australian government, filed, and soon forgotten. In September 1968, the British and Australian governments signed an agreement which released the British from all legal liabilities or further responsibilities arising from the testing program.

The issue lay dormant for almost another decade. In 1974, the Commonwealth government made a compensation payment of $8,600 to the widow of a warrant officer who had died of leukemia six years previously. The officer had been exposed to a relatively high dose of radiation while repairing a tank at the Maralinga test site. In December 1976 an Opposition frontbencher, Tom Uren, queried whether the minor trials had been in breach of international agreements in force at the time, and whether radioactive wastes were buried at Maralinga. He was reassured by the Minister of Defence that rumours and allegations to that effect were unfounded. Despite Uren’s call for a Royal Commission, the media failed to develop the story (Milliken 1986, p. 263).

Later in 1977 The Australian lonising Radiation Advisory Council (AIRAC) began a review of waste at Maralinga. But before it was completed, the leak of a Cabinet document shed further light on the matter. An article in the Australian Financial Review (Toobey 1978) revealed that the Minister of Defence had warned Cabinet that the quantity of weapons-grade plutonium buried at Maralinga was vulnerable to theft by potential terrorists, and that Australia might thereby be in breach of international safeguard arrangements.

The Fraser government, anxious to minimise embarrassment in general and to minimise any political threats to the burgeoning Australian uranium industry in particular, quickly asked the British government to remove that plutonium which existed in recoverable form. The British were agreeable, subject to further conditions, including that they would bear no further responsibility for removal of additional waste.

Not long after this operation was completed, the Fraser government released a ‘sanitised’ version of the previously top secret report, but by this time, the issue was to remain on the agenda for public debate. A team of investigative reporters from The Adelaide Advertiser published a series of articles raising questions about the incidence of cancer among Australian ex-servicemen and civilians who worked at the site. They further suggested that fallout from one test reached as far as Adelaide, and that local Aborigines had been contaminated by radioactivity (English & Delonno 1980a; 1980b; 1980c). ….. The Commission further recommended that decontamination and clean up of the former testing sites take place, and that the costs be borne by the United Kingdom government. Regarding compensation of those who may have been injured as a result of exposure to radiation produced by the tests, the Commission recommended significant changes to existing procedures…..” Source: “Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector » Chapter 16: A toxic legacy : British nuclear weapons testing in Australia”, Published in:Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector / P N Grabosky
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989
ISBN 0 642 14605 5
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series); pp. 235-253 weblink http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/lcj/1-20/wayward/ch16.html accessed 12.06pm Monday 16 Oct. 2015.

Are the Freedom of Information rules and laws, as currently written and implemented in this state, sufficient to meet the needs of people actually, either now or in the future? No they are not. I have proven this to my satisfaction. I speak of my own personal undertakings with regard to government over many years. I can show due cause to reconsider the actions of government in this regard.

I have a relevant fear in the context of the current debate. It is a profound fear. I fear that in the future proposed for us, government will continue to be derelict. I fear that the future, based upon my own reading of the past and the present, will be less open to the inquiring mind of the electorate than it is now.

Section 2 Iconography and Permission to Know

In the course of the nuclear debate as it has existed in South Australia since March 2011, I have heard many calls to the effect that Nuclear Power can save the world.

The trouble with the claim is that it is not the first time the promise has been made. I remember that the same claim has resonated within Australian society since the 1950s.

The physical residue of that promise took until this century to cleanup in South Australia, though to a controversial degree. Various matters relating to ownership and governance follow from that fact. In relation to the promises made by nuclear experts from the 50s till now is that what occurred HERE saved the world. Did it actually make any difference at all?

What did it save South Australia? What did the alleged promise in fact impose upon South Australia apart from lies, intolerance of dissent, abuse of law, injustice, social exclusion, dispossession and radioactive contamination of territory and the measured placement of fission products into food, the unborn and the child? The resultant stifling of dissent did not save the Free World from anything.

The last time social pressure was applied to a South Australian population to believe a science, bombs were dropping and opponents where called names such as communist and mad. The mail of citizens was steamed open by our own spies.

Nuclear history records the story of the constant dichotomy between the actions of the nuclear meritocracy, their political sponsors, and the consequences as reported by the common people. In my opinion. It is here that existence, not the mere promise, but the actual existence, of open government is crucially important. Or else we will be doomed to repeat the history of our state into the far future.

Who would own the data needed in the public space if and when South Australians do consent to an expanded nuclear industry? Who will be allowed into the archives and from what date? Will such access continued be barred for decades?

See Brookings Institute, “Back to the Future, Advanced Nuclear Energy and the Battle to Save the World” Published 12/12/2014 , Brookings Essay, at http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/backtothefuture?cid=%2000900013020016101US0001# Here is the heading graphic to the piece:

Believe it or not. This iconography is universal and a transmitter of threads and themes of social control in my opinion. It has happened before. There are many examples. The severe iconography is deeply flawed and revisionist in the light of recent events. Are we are to believe that what happened at Fukushima was the first shot in a war against an existential threat that the nuclear King Canutes will ultimately win – Whatever the cost across all schools of thought?

I allow myself as a voter and a human to contrast the icon with the reality for a moment:

Fukushima Prefecture by night, current era. (The Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, foreground, shines in the darkness on Feb. 18. The city of Iwaki in Fukushima Prefecture, top left, and central Tokyo, stretching from east to west on the horizon, are also seen. (Yusaku Kanagawa))

The blackness is caused by government issued evacuation orders. An order some people say was inadequate, and which many nuclear experts claim is excessive and the result of “radiophobia” – on the part of the people who lost their homes, land and incomes to radioactive fallout. What has happened between March 2011 and today has been lived by the affected people. No icon on behalf of the industry will erase the existential and person facts of the matters.

Propaganda re-interprets the reality of life as it is lived by the average Joe and Josephine. Those subject to propaganda are not supposed to focus on the down side. In fact there is great social pressure not to look at all at the human consequence in any sphere of perception.

There is great pressure to interpret and understand Fukushima and the aftermath only in the terms described and defined by the nuclear meritocracy and the authorities which buy the industry perceptions its art.

Source: Tepco via “Japan nuclear crisis: What’s in the smoke emerging from Fukushima I?”, By Peter Grier, Staff writer MARCH 23, 2011. Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0323/Japan-nuclear-crisis-What-s-in-the-smoke-emerging-from-Fukushima-I. The picture above shows the plant after the flood. Immediately after the earthquake, smoke issued from the reactor complex. There is no photo or footage remaining anywhere I know of to show this. All we have is the testimony of the workers who saw it. The icons of the industry are misleading. The wave and the quake had been predicted for decades. The reactor basements are within a wet zone in any case. I suppose the Brookings icon above at least got that bit right. However no giant nuke lady Queen Canute could save the people of Japan. In fact, were she actually to exist, she would hang her head in shame. In my opinion. Ethics and nuclear power. What can one say as a layman? At least a little bit. At the risk of offending some climate scientists apparently. Hormesis – one singular view – and one view of climate change. Suddenly married.

How will our government and its instruments deploy themselves in this respect in South Australia’s next nuclear “democracy”?

Science is neither politics, religion or sales script. I do not have to believe one thing over another thing, despite the pressure to do so. In fact, when I sense pressure to comply, being a stray cat, I jump out of my box and point out the obvious.

This promise has been made before, and as a result democracy was weakened, and free thinkers intimidated by the state and the society under its thumb. Justice denied due to nuclear imperatives, disseminated by the laws of foreign lands impacting our own. Constraining our own knowing as we sat in our homes.

Trust us or you will be toast, they continue to say

Section 3 Heresy

“Heresy is any provocative belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs. A heretic is a proponent of such claims or beliefs.” (Wikipedia).

Innocence on the part of government and its agents cannot be presumed. The history of this state and nation demonstrates that much. Dr. Hedley Marston was but one who suffered at the hands of authority.

Marston did not believe that the nuclear activities of the day were as perfectly safe as claimed. He rankled at the suppression of science that allowed the population to continue in ignorance. There was no hope of enlightenment for many decades.

The question is not actually what the nukers were doing, but what the people were allowed at the time to know about the falsehoods being promoted by both nukers and the government. That government, the record shows, was locked into servitude, darkness and deceit at the behest of agents and foreign governments hell bent upon “Saving the World”. This stance even now, though proven, is heretical in some quarters.

Climate science is a body of science. It, I suppose, is large, global and is inhabited by many experts who may or may not hold a range of views about the body of their relevant science. In considering Climate science, should I try to consider more of it than merely that which has been proposed as proof of the perfection of a product to suite a need?

Section 4 Some Findings from Climate Science

A short biography of Gerald E. Marsh is located at the link: http://www.gemarsh.com/about From this source we learn Dr. Marsh is “a physicist, retired from Argonne National Laboratory.”

The above list is not exhaustive. It is a sampling of the science of G.E. Marsh. I am reading it and considering it in the light of the apparently compulsory variation presented to the society and culture in which I live.

The advocates for conventional reactors point out the industry view that these current reactors are perfectly safe. Marsh and others state other types are safer.

To sum up my reading of climate science so far, Dr. Marsh points out, reports and finds many things. One of the things which occur to me is this: Yes, correlation between events does not prove causation. And so, considering what Dr. Marsh has written, I wonder, what comes next?

One ethical finding I have is this: The variants of climate science need not be given the benefit doubt. However, the victims of nuclear activity are so entitled. I refer the reader to this: http://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca which states in part: “….uranium mining and processing, which was carried out by tens of thousands of workers. Following the tests’ cessation in 1962 many of these workers filed class action lawsuits alleging exposure to known radiation hazards. These suits were dismissed by the appellate courts. Congress responded by devising a program allowing partial restitution to individuals who developed serious illnesses after exposure to radiation released during the atmospheric nuclear tests or after employment in the uranium industry: the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was passed on October 5, 1990. The Act’s scope of coverage was broadened in 2000.

The Act presents an apology and monetary compensation to individuals who contracted certain cancers and other serious diseases:

following their exposure to radiation released during the atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, or following their occupational exposure to radiation while employed in the uranium industry during the Cold War arsenal buildup. This unique statute was designed to serve as an expeditious, low-cost alternative to litigation.
Significantly, RECA does not require claimants to establish causation. Rather, claimants qualify for compensation by establishing the diagnosis of a listed compensable disease after working or residing in a designated location for a specific period of time…” Source : US Justice Department.

There has always been a dichotomy between the statements of politicians and scientists acting for the state and industry and the experience of the common people. And there always will be. The cold winds of a change in the political climate continue to blow, and they are beginning to freshen around the world. The common people in many countries continue to live in the cold.

Has any more recent science provided any more credence to Marsh’s climate science? Are there any other factors, newly discovered, which adds weight to the view that science as sales pitch may overlook things?

“The model developed by Zharkova’s team suggests there are two dynamos at work in the Sun; one close to the surface and one deep within the convection zone. They found this dual dynamo system could explain aspects of the solar cycle with much greater accuracy than before — possibly leading to enhanced predictions of future solar behaviour. “We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs; originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different [for both] and they are offset in time,” says Zharkova. The two magnetic waves either reinforce one another to produce high activity or cancel out to create lull periods….” As a once avid and now occassional listener of short wave radio, I find this information highly interesting for my own reasons. I have an inkling of the import of the Zharkova finding in its fundamental presentation as explained by Zharkova and others. In terms the lay person, such as myself, finds easy to understand in its basics.

Other references to the discoveries, observations, reports, findings and speculations of Zharkova include:

As far as I am aware, Marsh is a most receptive position from which to observe the findings of V.V. Zharkova. And so the reason to question the climate science icon as presented in the Westinghouse sales brochure grows stronger as science advances.

How can science produce a heresy? It is not a religion, it is a means of providing a best guess. Voting should be based upon the best information and best voluntary belief possessed by the ordinary people.

Meritocracy is not democracy, and often, the two come to clash. Even then, dissent is not a disease. It is merely free expression. If that is not permitted in the state, the politicians need to regulate the sales personnel who bid not only for my resources, but the state’s.

Section 6 The Metrological Consequences of Krypton 85 – DOE, Boeck.
The science contracted by the Unites States Department of Energy and conducted by William Boeck may not fit the stereotype of nuclear industry as presented in the public sales brochure. This work includes the following publications:

Other scientists have continued to present work which considers the topic of atmospheric stability in the present of krypton 85, which is emitted by various parts of nuclear industry.

The conventional view that Krypton 85 is merely a handy tracer, that emissions from nuclear industry are thoroughly understood, as presented by the industry to the public, is missing the work commenced and reported first by Boeck, and first contracted to him by US DOE. Since the original research, German scientists may have published confirmation of the original work. I’m merely a layman. The experts need go and look. I only report that some findings and conclusions of science do exist and do appear to challenge the comfortable and relaxed claims of the industry. The nuclear industry poses no unique threat to the environment by any undisclosed means. Boeck et. al. is not in the nuclear sales blurb though, as far as I can find.

Section 7 The Beneficial Dose

“Perfectly safe” is a political mantra of nuclear meritocracies, and has been since Curie was quite young.

Hormesis as a concept was promoted by the US Atomic Energy Commission during its role as a director of nuclear weapons tests and as a key plank its role of peak radiological safety regulator at that time. Disbelief when expressed on the part of the people resulted in charges of disloyalty to democracy. House UnAmerican Activities Committees considered whether or not citizens were disloyal and guilty of offenses under the terms of the Atomic Energy Act. A US born American citizen, Linus Pauling, suffered the confiscation of his passport by the US State Department for his publicly expressed opposition to the deposition of nuclear fallout across the USA and the world. There were innumerable examples of more ordinary people suffering a similar response from government and nuclear authorities throughout the period when nuclear experts and their politicians were out to allegedly save the world from divergent points of view. In the USA even today, the widow of a farmer is remembered as one who fought back. Her government wrote that she was a communist who should rather have been proud of her loss. The school of hormesis from that time to this claims Mrs. Bordoli-Laird suffered no such loss when the grey mist rolled across the farm at Warm Springs, Nevada in 1953. There is a correlation between ordinary witness across nations in this respect. A connection long denied.

My reading is that Marshall Brucer was more concerned with loosing patients in his radiology practice than he was about the willy nillie exposure of the healthy to a compulsory dose from government.

Of course, in his case, the political positions enabled by the theory of hormesis aided his undertakings. As is natural. Politics and promotion are not science; political things are subject to the political process. As it is, one outcome of the conflict of the reported and lived experience of many Americans in prescribed areas is their entitlement to compensation and apology from their government.

An Australian Royal Commissioner asked Professor Titterton, a former Chair of the Atomic Weapons Test Safety if the Professor has shared all of his relevant knowledge with the rest of the committee, the government and the people. Titterton stated that the question was libelous. When pressed to continue, he stated that, of course not, for in this he was constrained by American and British secrecy provisions imposed upon him. To what extent does the current provisions contained with the US Atomic Energy Act and relevant other laws and regulations constrain expert disclosure in the United States and around the world?

Are investors fully informed about the products known as “special nuclear materials” under the relevant laws? If so, how does this sit with the rules of the stock exchanges?

The school of hormesis turns to its political opponents and claims we are radiophobes who spread fear uncertainty and doubt in relation to the contents of the Westinghouse sales brochure. Ha. No, I’ll merely in the showroom, reading the pamphlet. And testing it in reality and in history. In order to see how many politicians were turned into the puppets of the masters of that particular proposition. The School replies with proofs claiming only benefit to specific and highly defined exposures to mice. The implication is that the emissions of industry call forth the same universal benefits across an entire state and planet and that the dose response of each individual living in the planetary lab has been previously discerned from the mice. This is the logical conclusion I make from the attempt made by Flinders University to claim that the responses to nuclear disasters by government and peoples have been, and continue to be, hysterical. (Flinders University, July 2012, Communications and Marketing, Website.

The school of hormesis proclaims certain naturally high background radiation areas of the world prove its position. That these NHBRAs convey certain health benefits, with no accompanying risk, to people. And that the cellular and sub cellular changes the school of hormesis has observed in the bodies of long term residents of such areas confirm also only benefit being endowed. Changes present in the cells of the bodies the residents of NHBRAs are confirmed. And that is all which is confirmed (http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/ramsar-natural-radioactivity/ramsar.html, High Background Radiation Areas of Ramsar, Iran. S. M. Javad Mortazavi (EFN))

A reading of diverse medical sources which report on disease incidence in the naturally high background radiation areas of the northern provinces of Iran, and of the naturally high background radiation area of Kerrala, India, reveal reason for concern and controversy. Obviously, there is no existential threat to entire populations, but elevated incidence of some diseases is in evidence among the populations who have lived in these areas for generations. These medical survey reports and the media reporting of one of them include:

http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011 –
Documents/mccd_Report1/Report%20on%20Medical%20Certification%202.pdf
REPORT ON MEDICAL CERTIFICATION OF CAUSE OF DEATH 2008 OFFICE OF THE
REGISTRAR GENERAL, INDIA GOVERNMENT OF INDIA, MINISTRY OF HOME
AFFAIRS, 2 A, MAN SINGH ROAD, NEW DELHI

“There is a dearth of published literature on the frequency and distribution of pediatric and adolescent non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in India according to the 2001 WHO classification.” Source: “Non-Hodgkin lymphoma in childhood and adolescence: frequency and distribution of immunomorphological types from a tertiary care center in South India”, Manipadam MT1, Nair S, Viswabandya A, Mathew L, Srivastava A, Chandy M.
World J Pediatr. 2011 Nov;7(4):318-25. doi: 10.1007/s12519-011-0303-7. Epub 2011 Jun 1

The nations in which the well known Naturally High Background Areas of the world tend to have a commonality: a lack of a central national disease registry. For example, a central registry for cancer reporting was called for in Japan only in 2001. An unexplained spike in childhood cancer incidence had been noticed by Japanese doctors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It remains unexplained to the current time. See data at “Matsuda A, Matsuda T, Shibata A, Katanoda K, Sobue T, Nishimoto H and The
Japan Cancer Surveillance Research Group. Cancer Incidence and Incidence Rates in
Japan in 2007: A Study of 21 Population-based Cancer Registries for the Monitoring of
Cancer Incidence in Japan (MCIJ) Project. Japanese Journal of Clinical Oncology, 43:
328-336, 2013 Download Source Data as Excel spreadsheets at http://ganjoho.j/pro/statistics ” Dataset: “Incidence (National estimates), cancer_incidence(1975
-2008)E.xls” Link: http://ganjoho.jp/pro/statistics/en/cancer_incidence(1975-
2008)E.xls

The following is a graph I made at home. Please check it for accuracy by consulting the source data at the Japan Cancer Surveillance Research Group. Cancer Incidence and Incidence Rates in Japan in 2007: A Study of 21 Population-based Cancer Registries for the Monitoring of Cancer Incidence in Japan (MCIJ) Project site.

Dissent is not a disease in a democracy. Surely the experts know the existence of the whole body of science; that they do not know merely that which they choose to believe and espouse.

As pointed out earlier, from Marsh, showing correlation does not prove causation. Coincidences do happen. Two events may co-exist and not be related. But they might be….

What is the relationship between the measured arrival of Chernobyl fallout in Japan as described in the paper above and the median latent period for radiation induced thyroid cancer in teenagers and young adults? Fukushima Medical University and Dr. Yamashita of Nagasaki University puts it at between 4 – 5 years.

Interesting isn’t it? Such interest is unwelcome in the industry view, in my opinion.

Section 8 The Law and the Profits

Certain nuclear activities are prohibited under the relevant Australian laws administered by ARPANSA.

For our nuclear future to exist in an expanded form, with greater diversity of profit motivated industry, Australian law has to change. The pages of the Westinghouse Sales Brochure – the harmless reactor, the beneficial dose and the planetary existential threat posed by Climate Scientists and, they allege, the workings of the Cosmos, (which they do not, at the present time, fully understand by the general admission of science) are presented as indisputable facts, are actually open for study in the light of wider perceptions. No debate is actually a dualism. I don’t have to mad or excluded to present, in public, different thoughts. Democracy does not possess a single brain, nor a single set of eyes.

I can see that Westinghouse has a right to lobby in Canberra as it is at the present time. I can see that the world nuclear industry wants Australians to change Australian laws. Including radiological protection laws – the industry pretty well uniformly wishes ALARA as an underpinning to be wiped out, to the exchanged for hormesis. (They use the term adaptive response and hormesis as if they there the same thing, but the two are very, very different.) They wish the Australian laws to change to enable them to make profit and save the world. Politicians and parliaments exist primarily to make and amend laws. Within those considerations, where is the consideration of matters relating to nuclear democracy? What may the voters have access to now and into the far future? Will government insist that nuclear industry forego some privacy in order that we might sufficiently know?

The past bears relevant testimony to the increasing risks posed to the people’s right to know. There needs to be a remedy no matter what the Royal Commission (and then the government and then the people) finally decide what our future is be. For the life of the government. Amen. (But we will be stuck with the slag heaps, as usual.)

Is it illegal to want to the whole picture? Not just the sales pitch? Am I free to actually think and express, even though I am not even a milkman?

Who sees two faces? Who sees a vase? Who sees both faces and a vase? The hub of a push bike wheel? A bellows? Who sees a representation of the results of randomly whirling atoms acting under the laws of probability physics in their minds eye?

Is the picture complete? What does it connect to, and who has been fooled?

What has the past to do with the future? At what point will the Labor Party seek to impose a cesium tax? What will the Liberals propose instead? Is all this null and void? Possible? Incomprehensible?

Conclusion

I ask the Leader of the Opposition to consider how the laws regarding access to information should be reconsidered in the light of our possible futures.

I ask that the ease with which people may access the records of government be improved.

I ask that the right to privacy of corporations be redefined in the light of Australian and Foreign Laws which may restrict the right of government and citizens to fully access information relating to “special nuclear material”.

I ask that the records of environmental monitoring be open to public access from the date of their creation. I ask that the public be free to contribute to the document creation. I ask that this openness be applied to all such records held by South Australian government and its agencies, created since 1952 and extending to the present time, and into the far future. Thank you for your consideration,